Category Archives: Futurist

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A team of scientists say theyve identified a possible new way to treat Parkinsons disease and improve the quality of life for patients thanks,in a strange twist, to a protein named after the video game character Sonic the Hedgehog.

In patients with Parkinsons, the brain loses the neurons that produce the brain molecule dopamine. Treatments exist to replace dopamine with a molecule called L-dopa, but doing so also tends to cause involuntary tremors known as L-dopa induced dyskinesia (LID).

However, coupling L-dopa treatment with agonists that increase the activity of a protein named sonic hedgehog (Shh) seems to prevent those tremors, according to animal research published in the journal Communications Biology on Wednesday. The discovery not only reveals new insight into sonic hedgehogs previously unknown role as a neurotransmitter, but could also lead to better, more accessible treatments for Parkinsons Disease patients if, that is, the animal research translates to human patients.

Typically, tremors are counteracted by deep brain stimulation, so the emergence of a less complicated treatment could make a huge difference in the lives of patients who have Parkinsons.

Deep brain stimulation doesnt help everyone, its very invasive, and not all people are eligible for the surgery, study coauthor and CUNY School of Medicine professor Andreas Kottmann said in a press release. The procedure is also not accessible to everyone.

Sonic hedgehog, which, yes, is inhibited by another protein called Robotnikinin, helps embryos form, but scientists had no idea it also functions as a neurotransmitter. By discovering that the same dopamine-producing neurons killed off by Parkinsons also produce Shh, the CUNY scientists say they have a better shot at restoring a Parkinsons patients brain to its healthiest, pre-disease state because they know now to replace more of the molecules eradicated by the disease.

Thats still a long way off,not the least because this current research was conducted on mice and primates. But if future studies continue to show a therapeutic benefit, we may soon find ourselves with better and more accessible treatment for a debilitating neurological condition.

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Brain Protein Named After Sonic the Hedgehog May Be Key to Treating Parkinson's - Futurism

SAIC Design has unveiled the MG MAZE concept, a compact two-seater concept study aimed at the next generation of car users, specifically people who want to do interactive and multimedia-related things inside their vehicles, other than simply driving from point A to point B.

Heres how that works: theres a sophisticated UI covering the entire front of the car, with a 3D map, avatar status and mission information. Players can build their status by discovering Easter Eggs, using the overlaying of images and digital content from the occupants perspective.

Sounds cool right? Well, you havent seen anything yet, because the actual driving aspect might just be the most interesting feature. Once you climb into the Zero gravity seats, you can drive this vehicle using nothing but your smartphone in order to steer.

As for all the visual and mechanical highlights, we count the canopy-like top, the transparent shell (emulating high-end gaming PCs with their exposed componentry) and a visible chassis, housing the motors and interchangeable battery in a plug and play style configuration.

With MAZE we wanted to consider what the future of a car community might look like, building MGs fan base and following. The move to digital is unstoppable, so we wanted to create a concept that connected this digital realm to the physical one that gives us the real joy in driving, said Carl Gotham, advanced design director.

The concept is a reaction to our lives during recent months, where we have been met with restrictions and limitations on our ability to move around and interact. Exploring the idea of mobile gaming, we used MAZE as a platform for people to get out and rediscover their environment in a new and relevant way, opening up new experiences with their city, he added.

Read more:
MG MAZE Concept Proves That Futuristic Pod-Like Vehicles Don't Have To Look Boring - autoevolution

As ice melts, the crust seems to warp for hundreds of miles.Elastic Earth

As rising temperatures melt Arctic ice at an alarming rate, the resulting rise in the sea level stands to reshape coastlines around the world. But the effects on the planet itself may be even more dramatic, according to a new study on how melting ice physically reshapes the Earths crust.

The outermost layer of our planet is surprisingly elastic, according to research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters last month. In the study, Harvard scientists discovered that the crust rebounds outward after the ice on top of it melts away, but doesnt always return to a perfectly spherical shape.

The study shows that these deformations are not only larger than scientists thought, but also that they can have significant influences on ecosystems in anarea for thousands of years.

For example, parts of the crust around the Arctic are still expanding like an extremely slow balloon after the weight of the ice age which ended 11,000 years ago was lifted off of it. As even more ice melts away thanks to climate change, the expansions and warping effects are compounded, creating an increasingly-complex landscape.

On recent timescales, we think of the Earth as an elastic structure, like a rubber band, whereas on timescales of thousands of years, the Earth acts more like a very slow-moving fluid. Harvard planetary scientist Sophie Coulson said in a press release. Ice age processes take a really, really long time to play out, and therefore we can still see the results of them today.

Being able to monitor this ballooning is valuable for scientists. Understanding how the earth is changing shape makes it easier to study and predict tectonic movements, earthquakes, and other geological processes, Coulson said in the release.

But it also has implications for climate change. As Antarctic ice melts and the crust pushes outward, Coulson said, it may deform and push bedrock out of position, further displacing ice and creating a vicious cycle leading to even greater melting.

READ MORE: Melting of polar ice shifting Earth itself, not just sea levels [Harvard University]

More on melting ice: Switzerland Covers Glacier With Giant Blankets To Keep It From Melting

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Harvard Study: Melting Polar Ice Is Physically Warping the Planet - Futurism

The prophetic art of Mystic Meg is taken to extremes in new science fiction show Foundation, Apple TV+s long-awaited adaptation of one of Isaac Asimovs most famous stories. It is based around the idea of psychohistory, a fictional science which uses history, sociology and mathematics to predict the future of large populations.

But instead of using it to play the lottery, its inventor (a genius called Hari Seldon) uses psychohistory to predict that the galactic empire he is living under will collapse within 300 years prompting him to put in motion plans to grow a new one.

Asimov modelled psychohistory on the kinetic theory of gases, where its difficult to predict the behaviour of a single molecule in a gas, but easier to predict the movements of a large collective. Throughout his series of books, it is used to forecast with alarming accuracy the comings of various Seldon Crises, often taking the form of war, political upheaval or systemic inertia.

It is an idea with obvious similarities to real-life fields of futurism, but how similar is it? Tom Cheesewright, a futurist who has advised companies such as Facebook and Google, doesnt predict psychohistory becoming a reality any time soon.

If everyones behaviour was predictable, you could calculate the future based on where we are at any time, he says. It would be like lining up a trick shot in snooker with seven billion balls in a row. It would be incredibly complicated and need more computing power than we probably have today, but ultimately you could calculate the outcome.

However, were not like snooker balls. Our behaviour might be different on any given day influenced by what we ate, or how well we slept by factors that are not just complex but incalculable. We cannot calculate the future with that much certainty.

Read more about the future:

Cheesewright adds that Asimovs theory is even more unworkable now than it was in the 1940s and 50s, thanks to technology fragmenting society into myriads of tribes. Large groups seem to be getting smaller, he says, and it has made social trend analysis harder. You talk to a teenager now and say, who are the two tribes in your school and theyll just look at you blankly.

He also touches upon an issue explored in Foundation itself: if a population gains knowledge of the future, will their behaviour change enough to thwart the coming of that future? The more robust your prediction, the more attention people pay to it, the more effect your predictions are going to have on the future. And that feels like an unsolvable conundrum to me.

Rather than deal in deterministic prophecy like psychohistory, futurists like Cheesewright tend to deal more in analysis and probabilities. One big company rang me up and said weve had eight consecutive record years and then everything fell apart. We didnt see it coming. Can you help us make sure we see it coming next time?

Cheesewright will then look at the intersection between existing pressures and incoming trends, along with analysing data and interviewing people at every level of the industry, before preparing a variety of probable futures and solutions. Its mostly about recognising patterns and convincing people of things that they dont want to believe in.

Unsurprisingly, the further in the future you go, the more unstable predictions become. The what is usually straight forward, Cheesewright explains. But the further you look into the future, its the when that gets harder.

He uses the possibility of automation eliminating a large percentage of jobs within the next 50 years as an example. Will we do it? Yes, I think so. How fast will we do it? Well, thats a very different question. Will we do it so slowly that we find either an alternative economic model or create a whole new range of industries we cant even envision yet? Or will we do it relatively quickly and cause rapid disruption to employment? Both remain possible.

Leah Harvey as Salvor Hardin Apple TV+

The obvious question for any futurist of course is what their big predictions for the future are. The most misunderstood one is the shift into the metaverse, he says, referring to the idea that the virtual and physical worlds will eventually blur. It is not us living in virtual reality. Its you being able to have your avatar being visible to people as you walk down the street. Thats undoubtedly coming.

In the longer term theres also self-driving cars. Thats going to happen, but the idea of a truly autonomous vehicle that can pick you up and whisk you off to your destination is much further out than people think.

And then, of course, theres Earths very own Seldon Crisis: the looming spectre of climate change.

Ive done quite a lot of work on the future of food in the last few years and the impact of climate change on that, says Cheesewright. If we get some of the predicted impacts on rainfall, for example, we will get large parts of the wheat-growing regions suddenly subjected to either drought or flood and in some cases both.

So suddenly, wheat gets much more expensive. All your classic staples in terms of pasta, bread, pizza, which have been cheap, suddenly start to become quite expensive. Are there other alternative grains? Are we going to shift to different growing regions? There are all sorts of interesting possibilities there.

Tom is a futurist with experience in broadcasting, writing and speaking on the subject. He has appeared on TV and radio across the BBC, Channel 4, 5, and Sky News, and he has consulted for Facebook and Google.

Read more fromPopcorn Science:

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Apple TV+'s new sci-fi Foundation: The real-life science of predicting the future - BBC Science Focus Magazine

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For years, scientists have been studying how the buildup of toxic molecules in the brain might cause or contribute to Alzheimers disease. But much more difficult has been figuring out what sets off the process that makes those molecules begin to accumulate in the first place.

Now, a team of researchers from Curtin University say that leakage of a toxic compound called beta-amyloid from the bloodstream might be the root problem, according to a mouse study published last week in the journal PLOS Biology. While its not yet clear whether the same process happens in humans, the discovery could give scientists a new way to track or monitor the onset of Alzheimers disease and, perhaps, help them develop new treatments to prevent it.

While we previously knew that the hallmark feature of people living with Alzheimers disease was the progressive accumulation of toxic protein deposits within the brain called beta-amyloid, researchers did not know where the amyloid originated from, or why it deposited in the brain, lead study author and Curtin researcher John Mamo said in a press release.

More specifically, the team found that beta-amyloid, a compound that builds up in the brains of people with Alzheimers thats been long associated with the onset of dementia, is formed outside of the brain, then gets shuttled throughout the bloodstream by lipoproteins.

In the new study, the scientists discovered that those lipoproteins tend to leak, allowing the toxic compounds to reach the brain and start to accumulate. The mice that had higher levels of amyloid production also showed a greater degree of inflammation in the brain, hinting at a link between the compound and the onset of neurodegenerative disease.

This blood-to-brain pathway is significant because if we can manage the levels in blood of lipoprotein-amyloid and prevent their leakage into the brain, this opens up potential new treatments to prevent Alzheimers disease and slow memory loss, Mamo added.

It would take confirming that the same link exists in humans before anyone can talk about new Alzheimers treatments. But Mamo suggests in the press release that specific drugs or even changes to ones diet could reduce the amount of amyloid in the bloodstream, potentially helping to prevent or at least delay Alzheimers and thats big news in the fight against a particularly horrible disease.

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Scientists May Have Discovered the Cause of Alzheimer's Disease - Futurism

BMW has a long history of showing off incredibly cool concept cars and then never putting them into production. Remember the killer Hommage Concepts (3.0 CSL, M1, and 328) or the awesome Vision M NEXT? Yea, none of those even sniffed production. However, there was one BMW concept car that actually did head to production looking surprisingly true to its original concept form the BMW EfficientDynamics Concept, which became the BMW i8.

This new render combines the BMW i8 with the brands latest concept car (that will also not become a production car), the BMW i Vision Circular, and what you get is a concept that looks surprisingly similar to the original EfficientDynamics concept.

The BMW i Vision Circular was a shocking car when it was first debuted just a couple of weeks ago. It showed off styling so odd it made the i3 look like a 3 Series diesel and it brought with it an interior that looked more like a Phillip K. Dick acid trip than anything else. While it was designed with some genuinely clever and forward thinking ideas, its actual styling left a lot of BMW enthusiasts wanting for something better looking. Turns out, combining its ideas with the BMW i8 does the trick.

While this render looks a lot like the BMW EfficientDynamics concept, its front end is from the BMW i Vision Circular. For example, it features the latter cars combined grille/headlight combination. Rather than having two separate things; kidney grilles and headlights; it actually just blends them into one unit. While it looks bizarre on the i Vision Circular, it actually works on this.

The best part of the BMW i Vision Circular was its impressive sustainability, thanks to its extreme use of either recycled or recyclable materials. Tons of second-life materials were used in the i Vision Circular and any material that wasnt second-life could be recycled into second-life material in the future, making it an incredibly sustainable car. However, its quirky looks detract from that message.

If BMW had wrapped all of that sustainable goodness into a package that looked as cool as this, many more BMW enthusiasts would be on board with the future.

[Rendering by @superrenderscars]

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Futuristic BMW electric car is a combination of i8 and i Vision Circular - BMWBLOG

The Great Depression hit the United States in 1929. By 1933, one in four Americans was unemployed and former millionaires were counting pennies. With no government-sponsored work relief available, it was all doom and gloom. And the automakers weren't doing any better either.

Production had dropped rather dramatically in just a few years. In 1929, Americans had bought more than four million cars. In 1932, this figure had dropped to only a million. While Ford had to slash yearly production from more than 1.5 million to only 300,000, premium carmakers like Peerless and Marmon disappeared altogether. And many more companies declared bankruptcy by the end of the 1930s.

Pierce-Arrow was one of the luxury firms that refused to give up. Established in 1901, the Buffalo-based company had become a status symbol in just a couple of decades. Favored by Hollywood stars and tycoons, Pierce-Arrow automobiles were also popular among royal families the world over. But things started to go south in the late 1920s.

Acquired by Studebaker in 1928, Pierce-Arrow started to leak money as the Great Depression hit. But unlike most of its rivals, it refused to develop and offer a lower-priced car. The Buffalo-based firm went in a completely different direction and opted to build its most opulent vehicle yet, the Silver Arrow.

Conceived at a time when Piece-Arrow was losing millions, the Silver Arrow was penned by Phil Wright, who was still in his 20s, and immediately approved by Harley Earl. With fully integrated fenders and headlamps mounted high with the line flowing up and back past the doors, the Silver Arrow resembled no other car from the company. And no other car available at the time, for that matter.

The car also featured a few groundbreaking aero features, such as flush-fitting rear fender skirts, recessed door handles (common on modern cars), and a sharp sloping rear section. The cabin was flanked by a V-shaped windscreen in the front and a slit-like window in the rear. The latter was pretty useless in terms of visibility, but it added to the car's futuristic, Batmobile-like styling.

Pierce-Arrow's out-of-the-box thinking continued with the placement of the spare wheels. Most cars of the era had spares mounted on the rear (attached to the trunk box) or placed on the front fenders, which were individual units, separated from the body. The Silver Arrow had them hidden in lockers in the impressively long front fenders. These could be opened by remote controls in the dash.

Speaking of which, thanks to a 462-cubic-inch (7.6-liter) V12 engine rated at 175 horsepower, the Silver Arrow was fast enough to turn that speedo to 115 mph (185 kph). Despite a curb weight of 5,700 pounds (2,585 kg)!

Pierce-Arrow rushed to have five examples of the Silver Arrow ready for the 1933 New York Auto Show. But with a price tag of $10,000, about 25% more than the most expensive Cadillac of the era (the equivalent of more than $200,000 in 2021), it essentially remained a show car.

It could very well be America's first-ever concept vehicle, a feat usually assigned to the Buick Y-Job design study of 1938.

Three of the five original Silver Arrow cars have soldiered on to this day and they're among the most expensive American classics. They don't come up at auction often, but when they do, they change hands for more than $2 million. It's not only the most sensational car designed in the early 1930s, it's also America's first futuristic concept vehicle.

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The Story of the Pierce-Arrow Silver Arrow, America's First Futuristic Concept Car - autoevolution

A futuristic city in Saudi Arabias Tabuk Province is a promising destination for sustainability, and technology. Called NEOM, meaning new future, it is a forward-thinking city that is supposedly nothing like the world has ever seen before. It is being called a revolution in urban living, with an immense potential for tourism. The city is going to be completely powered by renewable energy sources.

The city is a promising step towards the future of our world. It promises to leave behind all the trepidations of urban living we currently face. So yes, a city that is planned, without traffic, waste, or pollution. NEOM further promises a place that is going to allow easy access to essential resources and amenities to its residents. It is being reported that the city is going to be in the shape of a long thin line, and it will be a space for both human and nature to co-exist. It will do-away with the idea of suburban cities we have today, which encroaches into the natural world.

A smart city by all means, NEOM is going to take the term even more seriously than any other city has done previously. It is going to be technologically driven, which means that everything from traffic to live data for hazardous situations will be monitored. So, with the power of technology, a road accident could be avoided.

With efficiency as the key motivator, the city is going to redefine what it means to be living in an urban space.

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NEOM - a futuristic city that promises surreal is coming up in Saudi - Happytrips

On first click, Omnipedia feels like the shadow-sister of Wikipedia: empty white space with the occasional image, marked up by slim black text and iconic blue hyperlinks. But we are on a different internet now. This fictional encyclopedia is essentially the narrator of Neurocracy, which is part game, part murder-mystery novella and part postmodern exploration of how we take in stories and information. It is a labyrinth of text the reader, or player, navigates a 2049 version of our world by clicking hyperlinks. Having done some exploring, I believe its best to go in totally blind, though I will say that the central mystery concerns the death of the man who launched Omnipedia in the wake of Wikipedia, a character named Xu Shaoyong.

We click through from one fictional entry to the next, learning gradually that this future world is full of threats, from the presence of a civilisation-upending disease to binaural implants that track and enhance our experiences online, all the way down to dating shows that end in shocking loss of life. It feels unnervingly close to the internet as we know it, but with subtle differences that amount to clever environmental storytelling. For example, the GDPR cookie-tracking pop-up thats now the doorman at the gate of every website includes both familiar text about data and consent, and a note about our montages being tracked our emotional state, as tracked by an algorithm.

The storytelling style is rather like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, but it rejects linearity in favour of allowing the reader-player to intuit themselves through the web of information. The online rabbit-hole becomes a literary device. Theres even an option, as there is on Wikipedia, to start on a random page. This is ambitious and confident writing there is a sureness here that the machine of this mystery works so well that you can walk into the maze from any angle, and still find what you are looking for.

Omnipedia is an unreliable narrator we are encouraged to look at the edit logs of each wiki page, to see what information is new and what has been deleted. This feature of Wikipedia, programmed into the encyclopedia for transparency, is used here as a postmodern storytelling tool, and it provides a strange kind of tension. Revealing what is new information and old information on the search for the truth behind Shaoyongs death injects drama into the static, familiar space of a website.

New material has been added to Neurocracy every week, and its storytelling method is compelling. For me, the best way to engage is with a notebook, marking down my findings but there is a thriving Discord community sleuthing away too. What is more powerful than the murder mystery, however, is the depiction of a world that feels uncannily close to our reality. There is a sense in each entry that what we see there could be just around the corner. This is what excellent science fiction does: it holds up a mirror to culture as it is, and shows us what is just creeping up behind us.

Original post:
Neurocracy: futuristic murder-mystery fiction as told through Wikipedia - The Guardian

We officially found the toilet with the best view.Number One Throne

SpaceXs historic Inspiration4 mission launched like clockwork last night, kicking off the first-ever all-tourist spaceflight.

And, as promised, the views out of the massive cupola,which is a huge glass dome replacing the Crew Dragon spacecrafts port normally used to dock to the International Space Station, are breathtaking.

A video uploaded by SpaceX to Twitter shows the Earth slowly rotating hundreds of miles below an incredible sight, especially considering the dome is right abovethe small spacecrafts only toilet.

Its literally a hundred-million dollar view. In other words, the view while the crew is doing number two is truly number one.

SpaceX was able to remove the protective cover around the dome roughly twenty minutes into the flight, around the time Crew Dragon was gaining altitude to insert itself into a stable orbit.

While the crew will makes a doo with an incredible view, they will fortunately have a curtain shielding them from their compatriots.

Its not a ton of privacy, billionaire funder and mission commander Jared Isaacman told Insider in July. But you do have this kind of privacy curtain that cuts across the top of the spacecraft, so you can kind of separate yourself from everyone else.

And that also happens to be where the glass cupola is, he added. So, you know, when people do inevitably have to use the bathroom, theyre going to have one hell of a view.

READ MORE: SpaceX Crew Dragon cupola provides awe-inspiring view of the Earth from space [CNET]

More on the launch: SpaceXs Inspiration4 Already Blasted Past Jeff Bezos Highest Point

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The View From Inspiration4's Toilet Is Absolutely Incredible - Futurism